I Love This Bar

With a name like Megaprint Inc., it’s pretty clear what this print service provider handles: mega-huge prints, in particular, custom wallpaper. So when country music star Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill bought a plot in Rancho Cucamonga, California’s Victoria Gardens Regional Town Center, it took only a Google search to nail down a print provider. Named after Keith’s 2003 number-one single of the same name, I Love This Bar makes its West Coast-debut with its 11th franchise later this year. Each location boasts a concert stage, mechanical bull, 750-square-foot dance floor, and perhaps its most signatory feature – a 70-seat bar that’s fashioned in the shape of a guitar.

Directly above the bar: an over-sized guitar-shaped ceiling fixture centerpiece. Created out of drywall, the guitar structure protrudes directly from the ceiling. To add a bit of patriotic flair, Megaprint covered the ceiling guitar with American-flag themed wallpaper designed by Josh Wedge of Baldinger Studios in Phoenix.

“We were given a very good vector PDF as well as the Adobe Illustrator file that generated it, which printed a beautiful proof, but then wouldn’t output at full size. So, we turned it into a helluva big TIFF file and printed that,” explains Jay Buckley, Megaprint owner.

With the file problems solved, the shop took to its Agfa Anapurna M4f UV-curable flatbed and output the graphic onto 21 four-foot-wide sections of Roysons DreamScape 15-ounce vinyl suede-textured wallpaper using a Wasatch RIP. “We printed this job at fairly slow speeds to get the rich saturation of reds and blues that we wanted. It was worth the wait. Our customer had used solvent-printed wallpaper in the past, and was very pleased with the richness of the color we gave him,” says Buckley.

Highlands Wallcovering of Denver handled the installation for the two-level, 80 x 30-foot guitar-shaped ceiling fixture. Making sure the guitar graphic would align correctly was no easy task. “The biggest challenge for us was job planning. First of all, how does the installer want it – how many strips of what width and length, etc.? This is the kind of job where you must have it all thought out. We worked with the installers on alignment and gave them a print showing all the sections and dimensions,” says Buckley.

“Alignment was a serious challenge since the art and the surface are not rectangular. We wanted to solve the problems of aligning something this size before the material was produced," says Buckley. “This close relationship and careful planning resulted in an installation accurate to within ¼-inch over the 80-foot length of the guitar.”